NOT IN OUR STAR…

by Phyllis Frakt

The distant death throes of a star—

entire worlds gassed, doomed, 

consumed in its stellar belly.

 

They say our sun will do the same

and swallow the Earth in the “deep future”

five billion years from now.

 

While we wait, let’s celebrate spring,

a season in love with the sun,

carefree and heedless of remote catastrophe.

 

But humans bring peril five billion years early

Our planet gobbled up, not from afar,

but from us, under our benevolent star.

Phyllis Frakt began writing poems in 2021. Her previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test" and "Caught in Between." She lives in New Jersey.

DEAR 2022

an abecedarian

by Susan Vespoli

Abyss Painting by Gillian Fortson at Saatchi Art

Au revoir, heaviest year of my life,

bringer of shit and light,

carrier of catastrophe, 

death of my adult kid by bullet

explosion. It’s hard to say the word “dead,”

followed by the word “Adam.” I look for a

gentler way to say, “murdered son.”

How about “deceased,” or “angel son,” or

“invisible winged-son,” or “no longer

journeying on the physical plane.”

Kris, my cash-pay splurge of a

long-term therapist planted a

metaphor to help me

navigate: walking

over an abyss, holding a balancing

pole made of coping tools to remain

quaver-proof, (like poetry, therapy, 12-step, being in the

right-here-right-now), the rod’s weight increa-

-sing my moments of inertia,

tamping my tendency to fall. And I

understand, so I trek, carrying his

vivid lucence, his essence, as I

wire-walk, step tip to toe, eyes on

xystus on the other side of this

year, where I will enter 2023, sit cross-legged

zazen on the floor and breathe, Adam with me still. 

Editor's Note: The New Verse News previously published three of long-time contributor Susan Vespoli's poems about the killing of her son by police:  "Before I Knew Adam Had Died" and "My Ex-Husband Calls To Tell Me Our Son Has Been Shot By Police," and "Police Violence in Reverse."

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, Arizona where police violence and the criminalization of homelessness are alive and well.

DEFINITIONS

by Ben Prostine

Laura Contreras protests in Cincinnati, Ohio against President Trump's declaration of national emergency. ALBERT CESARE, The Cincinnati Enquirer via USA TODAY Network

A state of emergency is not the same thing as a
catastrophe, or a disaster. The key is in the first word.
It is the state in emergency. And it means certain things

emerge: off shore drills and coast guard ships,
the strip mine and the strip search and digital fingerprints –
an administrative task force on ad hoc prisons

and job destruction in the public sphere: more
security guards, more border patrols, customs and police
forces in-vested in military garb while a new design

for a portable bullet proof wall is engineered
and investments rise in razor wire stock. The day ends
with the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq looking up.

But disaster – that’s something different, older, astral.
It’s written in the stars, in fate, in sense: burning up
the bowels of the earth means bringing in a rising tide.

And catastrophe just takes us downward. The drama
of the state comes to its off-script denouement as
the choir desires to enter the theater once more.

The propped walls come down. Speech turns from
the ten thousand screens and returns to the streets, the fields,
something common: a world to be turned upside down

and rooted: this one round burning earth to be made green
again. A solidarity in the ruins, a power in the light –
out of disaster and catastrophe, emerging sprouts.

Ben Prostine lives near Soldiers Grove in southwest Wisconsin where he works as a herdsman, farm hand, and writer. He is the host of Poems Aloud!, a forthcoming radio program airing on WDRT (Viroqua, WI).

THE END

by George Held

Image source: Christian Science Monitor

The ending becomes clearer,
The fire and ice of catastrophe,
Ecological collapse or nuclear
Dystrophy striking Earth’s
Set for the last time on its human stage,
“The End” dissolving on its screen . . .
The exits are closed
While the Harvest Moon
Looks indifferently down.


George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has a new poetry collection Bleak Splendor (Muddy River Books, 2016).

AS THE PARIS CLIMATE TALKS BEGIN

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Place de la République on Sunday. Thousands of activists took to the streets of Paris ahead of climate summit, despite a ban on public demonstrations following the Nov. 13 attacks. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters via CBC News.

The weather has turned cold.
The sky is dirty white.
A crow caws without enthusiasm
From high up in a bare maple
As I scuffle through piles of leaves
On my way home from the post office.
The day is deeply still
As if holding its breath in anticipation
Of the massive storms
That have been predicted for this winter
After years of drought.
A sudden shower spatters the leaves
The decaying gardens, the pavement
Then stops abruptly
Leaving the ground barely wet
And the air smelling of winter rain.
I scan the clouds for signs of big weather
But see nothing that suggests
The downpour we so eagerly await
Not without some anxiety
Since heedless and profligate profiteering
Have so drastically mangled
The natural systems that have made the Earth
Habitable for us and others
And once the deluges begin
We cannot be certain that they will end
Before catastrophe.

We march in the streets
We block entrances and intersections
We interrupt and interfere with business as usual
Demanding an end to the toxic practices
That could mean the end of us.
But time is running out
And the ones with their hands on the throttles and gears
Act reluctantly
If at all.

I open my front door
And step inside the warm house
My morning's errands completed.
I have bought a few groceries
Returned a library book
And mailed a birthday gift to my daughter.
And now I settle down
With a magazine and a cup of tea
Glancing from time to time
Out the big front window
Wondering when it will rain.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.